Ancestor Stones - Aminatta Forna [38]
All the time I was growing up, corners and angles gradually replaced curves and arcs. Some people warned it was inviting trouble in through the door, making hiding places for every kind of spirit in search of a warm, dark place to nestle. The women complained the new-shaped houses were dirt traps, a nuisance to sweep, with corners full of dust and spiders’ webs.
Back then my father began to draw up plans for a new house. A house with more rooms for visitors, for relatives, for new wives maybe and new children. A house with a roof of corrugated iron.
I was one of the last. The oldest children had grown up and left home. The first coffee trees had overreached their prime. New seedlings were planted every year and every year extra labourers brought in to tend the bushes. At harvest everyone, wives and children included, had to pick alongside the men in the fields. And afterwards we helped to husk the sun-baked beans, pulling away the tacky pulp with deft, skinny fingers. Raking the pale green beans out in circles on the ground, so many moons fallen from the sky.
My father was a wealthy man. No doubt about it. But everywhere glittering riches were being dug out of the earth. In the next door chieftaincy gold had been found on one family’s land. Now the men were marrying wives from the ruling families, building houses, acquiring followers.
I remember where it all started:
A dry, cool morning, I watch the horizon fade, swept over by the red dust of the harmattan like a line drawn in the sand erased by the tide.
In front of us men shovel piles of sand. Others walk to and fro, toting great blocks of baked clay. They come from the village, the village given to my father a long time back. Some of them are the same ones who work in the plantation. Others I have never seen before. In the morning they arrive and depart by nightfall. Every day for weeks now my brother and I have left our house to take up our place opposite the site. Yaya is fascinated.
The walls of the house climb as each row of bricks is cemented into place. The new house is being built next door to the old one, and it is exactly the same shape, but all the dimensions are so much bigger. Right in the middle of the dry season storm clouds sailed over the village and unleashed a storm. Magnificent rumbles straight from Pa Yamba’s magic box. Spears of rain tearing into the new walls of the house, washing away the foundations. Yesterday our father himself appeared to say the men must work every day now until the house is complete. I heard the foreman try to tell him the men needed one day off to work in their own fields. My father’s face looked as though it had just been caressed by a freezing hand. A rigidness around the upper lip, a tugging at the corner of the eyes. I saw it. I know these things. I am a child, versed in reading adult faces. The foreman understands these things as well. His nerve sputtered and died.
No problem, Pa. And he scurried away like an ant.
Today I am foreman and Yaya is the labourer. Our bricks are baking on top of the drying rock, a great slab jutting from the earth in front of our home where my mother dries the clothes. The bricks are nearly ready, though the house we are building has run into some difficulties, just like my father’s house. The bricks crumble, the mud dries out and won’t stick. Today we work at refining our recipe, squatting on our haunches over the hole where we mix earth and water together, using a pair of sticks to swill a slippy sliding mess.
Busy, we are. Preoccupied with problem solving. Until our mother calls. Until it’s time to do something else.
A shadow falls over us. A hand appears: palm stained red by the earth, knuckles callused and grey. Short fingernails, ridged and blackened. I watch the hand. It pours grey dust from a funnel of torn paper. A moment later another